One of the types of addresses to which delivery service providers deliver items is business addresses. For example, the U.S. Postal Service™ regularly delivers mail to approximately 8.4 million business addresses. Of those addresses, approximately 3.5 million are located in places such as office buildings and shopping malls where the use of a secondary address component, such as a suite or room number, is needed to assign a unique address to the delivery point of the business customer.
To improve the efficiency of mail delivery before mail is delivered, the U.S. Postal Service, through the use of automated mail processing equipment, applies an 11-digit bar code to each mailpiece to identify each address. The U.S. Postal Service then uses that bar code to sort the mail in a delivery sequence order. A postal carrier needs little or no time to prepare the sorted mail for delivery since it has already been sorted in the delivery sequence order.
A significant percentage of items destined for delivery to business customers require secondary address information to uniquely identify a delivery point. Often such items are missing secondary address information or include incorrect secondary address information. When secondary address information is missing or incorrect, the 11-digit bar code applied to the item does not provide sufficient information to sort the item into its correct place in a delivery sequence. Such an item will require additional handling by a postal carrier prior to delivery, thereby increasing the time required to serve customers on the postal carrier's route. There is a need therefore to provide mailers that specify addresses for delivery items that they send with the ability to determined second address information so that mail entering the postal system is capable of being sorted into its proper delivery sequence. Further, a mailer should only be able to access information for business addresses that are already in the mailer's possession to protect the privacy rights of customers.